A
s Anna grew larger in the final months of her pregnancy, Albert began to hope that the birth of the child would help him effect a positive change of outlook. Anna held his hand on her belly as the child kicked and turned inside her, but he felt the little rumblings with a sense of confusion that fell well short of her own enthusiasm.
He sat silently next to her, watching her smile as she rested her hand on her stomach.
“It’s wonderful,” she said to herself.
Something in the ease of her manner grated on him. She seemed oblivious to him, unaware of just how much he struggled to keep himself together for the sake of the child.
He stood up and straightened his jacket. “I’m going to be late,” he said.
She didn’t say anything. She just smiled, or tried to, as he hurried away from her.
It was a relief to leave the house in the morning. Albert couldn’t wait to exchange the stench of damp for the fresh air of the bay. But as he got closer to work, bumping along through the city with other clerks and shop assistants, all worn out even before the day had really begun, he felt himself tensing up again.
He hated Citizen’s Insurance. The tedium of it had eaten into him, leaving him bitter and anxious. He had even begun to fall out with Sid Packard as he showed his increasing impatience. The daily routine of checking accounts, balancing books, calculating bills and issuing letters of payment made him ill with its banality. He couldn’t conceal his temper. Sid tried to tolerate this as much as possible, sensing that Albert was not himself, but when he muttered something insulting to Rodney O’Dell, the young nephew of a co-owner, Sid upbraided him and told him to display a healthier attitude. Albert turned the word “healthier” over in his mind for the rest of the day, wondering exactly what it might mean to display a healthy attitude to work so utterly meaningless.
His hands trembled as he typed up another letter of request. His fingers hit the keys with unusual force. Finally, at the end of his tether, he bashed the machine with his fists until the letterhead was an incomprehensible mass of inkblots and lacerations. In a blind rage he took a pencil off the desk and slammed it down into the open palm of his hand. The shock of it, and the stinging pain, returned him to his senses. He gazed numbly at the small, graphite-tinged puncture mark in the skin, clenched his hand around a crumpled piece of newspaper and walked into the bathroom to wash the wound.
After that Albert forced himself to think about the child more insistently. It was an exercise in self-discipline. He’d have to keep his head down, for a while at least. He knew how difficult things could get if he lost his job. All year the streets of South Melbourne had seen groups of unemployed men loitering around the factories and workshops, or making their way to the Sandridge wharves, on the off-chance of finding work. He read newspaper articles daily about the destitute of the city, and the Benevolent Ladies Society talked up a city–wide suicide mania, after an insolvent had secreted himself away in a Fitzroy boarding house to blow a hole through his brain in peace. At the back of Albert’s mind were desperate schemes, like joining Lane’s New Australia expedition and shipping off to Paraguay, or moving up north where they still had gold.
Of course Anna would never be in it, and with the house and all they wouldn’t be badly off as long as he could stay in work. He told himself this constantly, rehearsing the conditions of the minimal form of sanity that would let him shuffle along the surfaces of life without stumbling too heavily. He swallowed his pride and apologised to Sid who, harbouring a natural affection for Albert, patted him on the back and suggested that they have a drink after work.
Albert also apologised to the co-owner’s nephew, claiming that he was having some trouble at home. He said this so genuinely that it surprised him. But wasn’t that the truth? While he could tell himself that he loved Anna, after a manner, he was also remote from her, unable to satisfy himself with her, unable to bend her in the way that he secretly craved. Something lurked within him. A clammy, shapeless thing that shifted suddenly out of its repulsive slouch according to its own primitive needs. When Albert felt it move he cowered from himself. It was always there, at the bottom of him, waiting to stir, waiting to grip him.
“You are suffering from an instinctual deviation,” Dr Winton had told him. It was shortly after the debacle of the wedding night. He had visited the doctor at his rooms in St Vincent Place, complaining of lethargy and weariness. All he was looking for was a tonic or some pills, something to pick him up a bit.
Winton looked at him, folding his hands over his knee. “Tell me what’s wrong, Albert,” he said. “I can call you Albert, can’t I?”
Albert fumbled for an answer. He said he had trouble concentrating, tired easily and felt frustrated. Sometimes he felt himself trembling.
Winton exhaled through his nose and nodded. “What about your private life?” he asked. “Recently married, I understand.”
“Yes,”Albert said.
“Tell me what it’s like for you, and your wife. Anna, isn’t it? I knew her aunt.”
Albert pushed out his lower lip, then quickly sucked it in. The questions kept coming. They were intrusive and humiliating, but the doctor’s authority held him there and impelled him to answer. Albert suddenly felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him.
“Have you ever desired a man?” the doctor asked.
“No,”Albert replied.
“Do you associate sexual pleasure with violence?”
“No,” he replied again.
“But you have visited prostitutes?”
He didn’t answer, feeling as if he had been backed into a corner. He tried to explain to himself what exactly had happened on the night of his wedding. They had only talked, but Angelique’s voice lingered with him more powerfully than any physical sensation he’d known.
“You are aware that syphilis is a disease that can be brought back and spread through the home?” Winton looked into his eyes accusingly.
Albert sat silently, trying to avoid the doctor’s stare as if he were a criminal awaiting judgement.
“Your wife is a beautiful woman, Albert,” Winton said. “Any man would desire her.”
Albert already hated him. Winton seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in articulating his diagnosis and explaining the necessity of self-restraint. “Instinctual deviation.” The phrase filled Albert with guilt.
And then there was that incident in the street, when Winton had almost let things slip in front of Anna. He might have to kill the doctor, Albert thought. He could wring his neck or crush his forehead, or beat him to a pulp with his own gold-handled walking cane.
In such thoughts he found a perpetual nightmare weaving through the monotony of his daily life. Lying in bed, thinking about what Winton had said to him, Albert was afraid of his own rage, his own propensity for violence, the secret life seething within him. For a long time he couldn’t close his eyes. He felt sullied by the doctor’s verdict, accused by the strangeness he felt beside his pregnant wife. He listened to the rhythm of her breathing, sensed the darkness and the creaking of the house descend upon him. For hours they pressed closer and closer and he retreated further and further into himself until, finally, he slipped away into an abyss where the burdens of consciousness and guilt faded, and the darkness came alive with the wanton voices of the fallen and the lost. Every night he returned to this prehistoric dung-pit, a wilderness of bones and seashells and gaunt skeletal bodies languishing outside the city walls. This was his home, his resting place. He was an outcast, a stranger, a shadow.
In May 1892, Anna gave birth to a son. To see such raw, helpless life convinced Albert that his place was out in the world fulfilling his function as a breadwinner, and for a moment it seemed as if the mantle of responsibility had fallen so squarely on his shoulders that there was no time for anything else. For the first few weeks after the birth he doggedly went off to the city offices of Citizen’s Insurance in the morning and returned promptly at 5.30 p.m. to take care of the household chores. The simple realities of the situation had a gravity about them that he found comforting and distracting.
Slowly Anna’s body resumed its usual litheness and her breasts became softer. But by then there was Paul to compete for her attention as well. In the evening Albert sat on the couch and read the
Bulletin
or the
Boomerang,
trying to distract himself, while Anna nursed the baby and chanted endearments in childish German. The sound of the language rankled.
He noticed that Anna was speaking more German than English, and began to feel marginalised by the bond, codified in another tongue, between the mother and the baby. He wondered what she was saying about him, wondered whether he was being betrayed by the words he couldn’t understand. Exacerbating this was the constant presence in the house of Hamish McDermott, the child from next door. Since the day Anna had bandaged his hand and called him
Liebchen,
the child had developed a fascination with her that now, as he was old enough to walk about himself, had him constantly appearing at the front door or sitting attentively on the living room floor while Anna breastfed Paul. With both his parents often working, Anna had agreed to mind the child during the day and in the process had started teaching him her parents’ tongue, which he took up with all the alacrity that children have for new languages. Hamish had acquired a smattering of German from Anna and was now trying to communicate with the baby using a rudimentary German vocabulary. Albert soon felt more alone than ever, and imagined that he’d have to tear this remote language out of his wife’s mouth before she could truly be his.
One evening he met his brother Robert at the Limerick Arms and brought him home to see his new nephew. When they arrived, Anna was in the living room with Paul and Hamish rehearsing vowel sounds as if she were conducting an actual classroom, gradually shaping her lips and tongue into words which Hamish repeated to her obediently.
“Bald ein Blümchen, bald ein Stein, bald erfüllt ein Vögelein dich mit innigem Entzücken.”
The child mimicked this almost perfectly. Albert stood at the door, dumbfounded.
“Shouldn’t Hamish be getting home?” he said.
“Sarah said she’d come by when she gets home from work,”Anna replied.
“But she’s already home. The light is on. Hamish, why don’t you run and see if Mummy is home already?”
The child scooted out into the street as Albert assumed command of his living room, leading Robert, who looked a bit sheepish, inside.
“We hear nothing but German these days,” Albert said by way of apology to his brother.
“Well, there’s no harm in that,” Robert said.
“Of course not,” said Albert soberly.
Robert stayed for dinner and after Paul had fallen asleep the three adults had a supper of corned beef and potato salad which Anna had prepared that afternoon. Robert was a writer at the
Melburnian,
a weekly publication that blended factual reportage, trivia and society gossip, so their discussion meandered around the news of the day. But Robert was anxious not to let his younger brother feel overshadowed, and constantly returned the conversation to the insurance firm, the baby or something calculated to draw Albert out a bit. Anna was relieved that Robert had come. She knew that Albert was more likely to be amicable in company. As if the presence of a third person formed a liberating breach in the usual routine of the evening, Albert spoke easily and with a degree of good humour. For a moment she felt as if things were quite normal.
“Rob, tell Anna about that forgery,” he said to his brother as he poured three glasses of warm beer.
“You mean the Howard thing?”
“Of course.”
Anna remembered the awful day she’d been followed by the doctor and ended up watching the crowd prepare to rip the murderer apart. Throughout the week of Edmund Howard’s trial it was impossible not to feel the horror of the crime, as one tumid euphemism after another cloaked the image of the violated corpse. Because the man had once performed a hypnotist’s act at the Polytechnic, people said he must have mesmerised the girl – Edith Joyce was her name – and then killed her when the trance was broken. Stories about the “Jew’s eye” did the rounds (so much so that the
Australian Israelite
published an angry rebuttal) and books on mesmerism were briefly in demand at the Coles Book Arcade. But the interest died out as quickly as it had started. By the time Howard was executed, fact and fiction were so thoroughly confused that one wondered whether the whole thing had been some fleeting, common hallucination, as ephemeral as a daydream. The execution had a profoundly purgative effect on the press and the public alike. The murder was soon a sombre memory and the city quickly found other atrocities and scandals on which to sate its hunger for sensation.
“I don’t like hearing about that man,” Anna said calmly. “I was glad when the whole thing died down.”
“Why is that? Do you find it frightening?” asked Albert.
Anna looked at him, as if the question were obtuse.
“Who wouldn’t be frightened?” said Robert.
Anna recalled the impression she’d had on the ferry, when she’d felt as if the waking world were animated by a sinister logic that was only truly accessible in dreams.
“It’s not simply the facts of the case that are frightening,” she said. “It’s the sense that something dreadful, just out of sight, is living side by side with commonplace things. I read in the paper that the girl was due to meet her sister and her brother-in-law at the Follies the day she went missing. In ordinary details like that there is something unspeakable that terrifies me more than the thought of the murder itself.”
What she said touched Albert directly, yet in a way that she could not have anticipated. He was keenly aware of his own ordinariness, the banal fact of his body, perched on a chair in the kitchen of a cheap worker’s cottage. His stomach had begun to sag a bit. He had become sedentary. At night he stretched out on the couch and read the paper or a journal and drank a glass of beer before dozing off. On the surface he was a fairly typical bloke. It was somewhere else, in nightmares and in waking dreams, that he met his double, the dim presentiment of all his possible crimes.